CSSD Project Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence held an international competition and selected three Media Fellows to receive reporting grants. They joined the project, supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, and did research in the Middle East to produce innovative media stories.

Yasmin El-Rifae describes her experience with a volunteer feminist group resisting sexual violence that formed during the Egyptian Revolution. Her article ‘What the Egyptian Revolution Can Offer #MeToo’, highlights the way Egyptian activists are using self-organized, direct, and offensive tactics to fight sexual violence. In this era of the #MeToo movement, El-Rifae urges her readers to move towards a feminist praxis that creates global and systemic change and to look to Egyptian feminists for direction.

In her article ‘The Bureaucracy of Isis’, Samira Shackle looks at the dilemmas involved in the quest for restorative justice in Mosul post-ISIS. Focusing on the experience of refugee women, she reframes dominant narratives about religion and gender-based violence. Shackle’s interviews with family members of ISIS collaborators and victims of ISIS violence uncover how women suffer violence at the hands of family, the state, and ultimately how much human suffering has been created by imperialist interventions in Iraq.